- Title
- "Whose Plot Was This?": Shakespearean Convergences in Fletcher's The Wild-Goose Chase
- Creator
- Edelstein, Gabriella
- Relation
- New Directions in Early Modern English Drama: Edges, Spaces, Intersections p. 219-236
- Publisher
- Walter de Gruyter GmbH
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- The title page of the 1652 edition of The Wild-Goose Chase(first performed 1621)declares that the play is“the Noble, Last, and Onely Remaines of those Incomparable Drammatists,{|FRANCIS BEAUMONT, | AND |JOHN FLETCHER,}Gent.”1The names are bracketed together, by then a familiar convention for readers of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays printed after 1620.2Somewhat unconventionally, however, lower on the page, is another pair of bracketed names, albeit in a smaller font:“{JOHN LOWIN, | And |JOSEPH TAYLOR,}Servants to His late MAJESTIE.”3Lowin and Taylor are given the stamp of authority through this similar formatting because the title page reinforces how these two erstwhile actors“Retriv’d for the publick delight”a play that was thought to be lost to the ages.4The title page situates Low in and Taylor with in the general tradition of the Beaumont and Fletcher canon, which used print to present plays as produced and shared by a pair of male friends.5The commendatory verses to The Wild-Goose Chase also make much of Low in and Taylor’s find, and in one epigram by William Eccleston, they are again conflated with Beaumont and Fletcher: In this late dearth of wit, when Jose and Jack Were hunger-bit for want of fowl and sack,His nobleness found out this happy means To mend their diet with these Wild-Goose scenes,
- Subject
- wild-goose chase; Shakespeare; drammatists; verses
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1440649
- Identifier
- uon:41209
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781501518218
- Language
- eng
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